[Source:
MichaelBarrier.com]
[…]
Almost invariably, anyone who wrote about comic books in a mainstream publication did so to condemn them. But there were exceptions.
The anti-comics din was loudest around the time the novelist Charles Beaumont wrote a piece for the May 1955 issue of a California magazine called Fortnight. Beaumont had visited the Beverly Hills offices of Whitman Publishing Co., which produced comic books published under the Dell label. Whitman was then the colossus of the comic-book world, with sales of around 300 million copies a year. Most of its comics were based on animated-cartoon characters like Donald Duck and Bugs Bunny, or television cowboys like Roy Rogers and Gene Autry. Beaumont’s article focused on how industriously Whitman’s editors scrubbed from their comic books anything that might conceivably offend an anxious parent. He paused, though, to acknowledge the special status of one of Whitman’s artist-writers, Carl Barks, whose work had “a freshness and originality which both inspire and depress colleagues.” […]
